Size vs. Interaction
If we compare the Ubisoft or GTA/GTA clone games with Bethesda open world games, there's a bit of a difference with the depth of the world we can explore and how we can interact with it.
Let's take Assassin's Creed or a GTA-like -- say Saints Row. Here, we have a large world that is purely aesthetic, with zero interaction outside of "points of interest" which are few and far between. Everything else is fluff. We can see an endless amount of NPCs roaming the areas, but generally speaking these are all nobody characters. Any important NPC to plot exists in an alternate reality until you're in an active plot section.
Bethesda games, the fluff is there but is different. A large amount of NPCs can be interacted with outside of quests and most every item is now likewise able to be picked up. Except most of the items are fluff. I feel as though this detracts from the importance of items that aren't quest items and makes it less appealing to explore new areas. Oh look, it's another random house I can enter -- right, it's just filled with paper, produce, and other miscellaneous items every other house has. I guess I'll wait to explore until a quest wants me to go there.
On both accounts, I feel as though I'm a slave to the maps in every open world game. I don't want to explore a world of fluff to find the content with actual substance. I want to find the points of interest and have the game tell me what it is I should be doing to have fun.
"Fluff"?
When I'm saying fluff, I'm referring to something that isn't enhancing the game in any way that's meaningful to gameplay. Yes, you can make a game where the distance between a quest's end to the next quest's beginning is a 20-hour trek through an empty wilderness, but you've just exceeded the definition of padding gameplay to an absurd degree. Even if the world is beautiful to explore, who exactly is this game supposed to be marketed to if there's very little to interact with in this world?
My interaction with an open world game always seems too shallow if I'm actually trying to explore. There may be 10,000 hidden collectibles in the world, but behind every back alley or rooftop with a collectible are countless more with nothing. And the collectathon portions usually amount to just getting an achievement or an item you get so late in the game that it's not even helpful for the actual plot of the game. It makes collectibles feel like a completionist's goal that otherwise has no purpose.
Looking Up
This isn't to say there's no hope of an open world game actually feeling immersive and not just full of "here's a lot of space between actual content." I also don't know that the feelings of others as a whole suggest my vision of a good open world game is what people want -- at least, I haven't seen this as a big talking point of disappointment for others. Ok, maybe that's rude. It's not that it's "not what people want," but developers don't have a reason to improve if the current norm has been seen as passable.
I do enjoy some of these games when I actually play them, but I feel as though I play them differently than intended because I don't enjoy the fluff. I rush between points of interest for the actual gameplay/minigames and plot progression. Everything else I ignore. This also makes me skeptical of games that haven't come out yet that are banking on "open world" being a point of interest.
My biggest skeptical upcoming game is the next Zelda. Boasting the world is huge has deterred my interest. I suspect a world of fluff filled with enemies.
I could keep talking about this for a while, but it's getting late. Maybe a topic to revisit in the future on ideas I'd have for actually improving the genre. For now, I'll just say I do want to be proven wrong. But only time will tell if I'll ever see a game that boasts having a huge world where this means "huge world that isn't just aesthetically huge for the sake of being huge."
